After a historic win at last Sunday’s Academy Awards, 2023’s Best Animated Feature Film The Boy and the Heron has earned another run in theaters. Today, Studio Ghibli and GKids announced that the Hayao Miyazaki movie is getting bring-back screenings as early as next Friday, March 22. As a treat to fans who supported the movie all the way through, the re-release will feature special content to invite them back to movie theaters. A new trailer was also released to celebrate the event.

The new screenings of The Boy and the Heron will come both in the original Japanese language with subtitles and dubbed in English (with the voices of Christian Bale, Dave Bautista, Gemma Chan, Willem Dafoe, Karen Fukuhara, Mark Hamill, Robert Pattinson, and Florence Pugh). Additionally, the new screenings will kick off with the introduction of Joe Hisaishi — the composer and long-time collaborator of Miyazaki, who worked on the score of other Ghibli titles such as The Wind Rises and Ponyo on The Cliff By The Sea. The screenings will also showcase a pre-recorded animation session with supervising animator Takeshi Honda, who earlier this year took home the Best Character Animation prize at the Annie Awards.

At the Oscars, The Boy and the Heron made cinema history by becoming the second-ever hand-drawn animated movie to win the Best Animated Feature Film category since it was created. The other movie to win was also a Miyazaki masterpiece: 2001’s Spirited Away. At the box office, the Miyazaki film is also a standout: So far it has earned over $46 million at the North American box office. This makes The Boy and the Heron the highest-earning Studio Ghibli film in North America to date.

Why Is ‘The Boy and The Heron’ So Popular?

One of the reasons that made Studio Ghibli fans flock to theaters to see The Boy and the Heron is because the film was announced as the swan song of Hayao Miyazaki. Granted, the Japanese director has come out of retirement to make a new movie more than once in the past few years, but the fact that The Boy and the Heron seems like the filmmaker’s most personal story might suggest that this time his retirement is for real.

Another reason why The Boy and The Heron got so much attention is, whether Miyazaki is retiring or not, this is the first movie directed and written by the director in a decade. The Oscar nomination also helped garner interest for the story, and a new run in theaters is sure to make the animated movie even more of a box office hit.

The Boy and the Heron returns to theaters next Friday, March 22.

via Collider